Chilean President Michelle Bachelet has been asked to recommend practical solutions to climate change on the first day of the Vatican conference in November. Her participation is especially controversial given that Bachelet introduced legislation to allow abortion in Chile last year that is currently pending. She has also promised to introduce a homosexual “marriage” bill soon.

The high profile pontifical event titled “Health of People and Planet: Our Responsibility” will highlight the “health consequences of climate change” and “make recommendations to be submitted directly to Pope Francis and other world leaders,” according to the Vatican website. Pope Francis will be represented by Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Piero Parolin.

Columbia University economist and UN development guru Jeffrey Sachs will once again be present. His participation in pontifical events has been the criticized in pro-life media before. Sachs led the global effort to place abortion as one of the Millennium Development goals. As head of the Earth Institute at Columbia Sachs has spearheaded a revival of neo-Malthusian fears at the United Nations and academic circles warning that humanity is “trespassing planetary boundaries” and reaching the end of the “Earth’s caring capacity.” Sachs has also written that abortion is a “cost-effective” way to deal with unwanted children.

Sachs is said to be a frequent visitor of the Papal residence at Casa Santa Marta alongside the Chancellor of the Pontifical Academies hosting the conference, Archbishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo. The two are credited as the architects of what the Washington Post described as the “coup” that delivered Pope Francis’ endorsement of the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change in the 2015 papal encyclical Laudato Si. That encyclical provided much needed moral backing to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and U.S. President Barak Obama’s celebrated Paris Climate Agreement.

University of Washington researcher Howard Frumkin will present his work on a seminal joint Rockefeller-Lancet study on the environment and health. One of the conclusions of that study was that a “reduction in fertility” in developing countries would be positive for the environment.

The study recommends that increased contraception use be promoted in developing countries through mass media, the public health sector, and “culturally appropriate social marketing approaches to increase demand.” It only recommends a change to environmentally friendly lifestyles in wealthy countries, even though it finds that population growth in developed countries will have a “disproportionate effects on environmental sustainability because of their prevailing high consumption lifestyles.”

Representatives of the World Health Organization are also scheduled to speak at the conference about health effects of air pollution and climate change. WHO publications highlight access to contraception as a way to reduce carbon emissions and “mitigate” climate change, though recent studies by UN demographers deny the usefulness of more investments in contraception to prevent catastrophic climate change.

Well known population control theorists expected at the conference include Partha Dasgupta associated with Population Matters, and John Schellnhuber, founder of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Both are known for attempts to estimate the optimal absolute number of people that our planet can sustain.

The conference concept note on the Vatican website describes the threat of climate change as an “existential question of whether civilization as we know it can be extended beyond this century” and calls for “more drastic actions to limit air pollution and climate change below dangerous levels.”

LifeNews.com Note: Stefano Gennarini, J.D. writes for the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute. This article originally appeared in the pro-life group’s Friday Fax publication and is used with permission.